T.K. Dalton
1330 Dean Street
Brooklyn, NY 11216
tkdalton@gmail.com
Word Count: 1000
First North American Print Rights
Bad Education
“I don't enjoy anything as much as making you suffer.” With lines like this, Mario Vargas
Llosa effortlessly evokes Emma Bovary with the eponymous (and nearly anonymous) character in
Edith Grossman's English translation of his newest novel, The Bad Girl. His narrator is a doormat,
one part the inept Charles Bovary and two parts the lovefool of Flaubert's Sentimental Education,
Robert Arnoux. He responds to the bad girl's claim with uncharacteristic assertiveness: “I realized
it all too well many years ago, and the worst thing is I never learn. I even seem to like it. We're the
perfect pair: the sadist and the masochist.” The Bad Girl abounds with pairs of such terrible
perfection. In an 1864 letter, Flaubert expressed his goal with Sentimental Education: 'I want to
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write the moral history of the men of my generation - or, more accurately, the history of their
feelings.'' With this erotically-charged tale spanning thirty years of exile, deception, revolution, and
more, Vargas Llosa contributes a chapter to a revised edition with this consuming, sprawling book
about love, its secrets, and its seemingly inextricable relationship with human suffering.
The story begins in 1950s middle-class Lima, where a teenager named Lily mambos away
with the heart of the quiet, bookish Ricardito. “I fell in love like a calf,” he recalls decades later.
Despite his devotion during that swinging summer, Lily repeatedly refuses Ricardo's affection, and
when she's revealed to be not Chilean as she's claimed, she disappears. The pattern repeats itself
for decades, but knowing this spoils nothing. Despite its narrator's unwavering devotion to a
deceptive compulsive liar, The Bad Girl is remarkably suspenseful.
Vargas Llosa achieves this by pairing Ricardo with a rotating cast of foils who force the
complacent narrator to act, and perhaps not coincidentally, this is precisely the appeal to him of the
bad girl. As Lily the mambo-dancing teenager, she was able to pull his head out of his French
textbook. After Ricardo moves to Paris, he meets one Comrade Arlette (guess who?) on her way to
a revolutionary training camp via France. Though love in the 20th century became a political act,
and as important as politics seems to many of these characters, for Ricardo and others, politics is
also a front for something emotional and nebulous, secondary to love. Even while watching as his
uncle and others like him back in Peru “reached old age—the very brink of death—bewildered, asking
themselves why we were moving backward instead of advancing and were worse off now...than when
they were starting out,” to Ricardo, his own hard personal history and his country's political turmoil
seem interchangeable.
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In both cases, the way it turned out was not the only possibility. In fact, when the bad girl is
away, Ricardo flourishes. Over the years he develops temporary, intense friendships with a gifted
interpreter nicknamed The Dragoman, a young family with a child who does not talk, a barrelshaped revolutionary, a young theater designer, and an aging man in Peru who can find the right
place to build a jetty by instinct alone. Only through these relationships is he able to even ask
himself why he tolerates the bad girl, someone who—when she's there at all—responds to “I love
you” with: “You'll never live quietly with me, I warn you. Because I don't want you to get tired of
me, to get used to me. And even if we marry to straighten out my papers, I'll never be your wife. I
always want to be your lover, your lapdog, your whore...Because then I'll always keep you crazy
about me.”
The perspective of one friend, a bisexual Peruvian who paints portraits of thoroughbred
horses belonging to aristocratic Londoners, gives a key insight into the nature of love for these
men, and for the bad girl: “The secret to happiness, at least to peace of mind, is knowing how to
separate sex from love. And, if possible, eliminating romantic love from your life, which is the love
that makes you suffer. That way, I assure you, you live with greater tranquility and enjoy things
more.” The notion of love in The Bad Girl seems inextricable from and even inconceivable without
suffering. For her part, the bad girl is equally trapped. She runs away with a Japanese gangster and,
via The Dragoman, contacts Ricardo. He arranges a visit and confronts the love of his life by asking
the bad girl whether the gangster, Fukuda, is the love of hers:
“I don't know if what I feel for Fukuda is love. But never in my life have I depended so much on
anyone the way I depend on him. The truth is he can do whatever he wants with me.”
She didn't say this with the joy of someone, like the Dragoman, who had discovered a love-passion.
Instead she was alarmed, surprised at something like this happening to a person like her, who had
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thought herself immune to those weaknesses. There was something anguished in her eyes the color of
dark honey.
“Well, if he can do whatever he wants with you, that means you've finally fallen in love. You're a
glacial woman, and I hope this Fukuda makes you suffer the way you've made me suffer for so many
years...”
I felt her grasp my hand and rub it.
“It isn't love, I swear. I don't know what it is, but it can't be love. More a sickness, a vice. That's
what Fukuda is for me.”
If all happy families are alike and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, the same
could be said of relationships. What's fascinating about Ricardo and the bad girl is how resonant
their connections are with all kinds of love, from tryst to marriage. Once past the conceit, the
unhappiness between, within, and around these two is so singular, I never knew what was going to
happen next—almost like being in love. Almost.
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